King
of Macedonia and
conqueror of the world, he overthrew the Persian
Empire and extended his rule from Greece to Egypt
and all the way to India.

Alexander's achievement
laid the foundation for the Hellenistic world, the
Roman Empire, and even the spread of Christianity:
all the New Testament writings were in Greek as a
result of Alexander's influence.

What
did Alexander look like?

Alexander was said to be
extremely handsome. Many portraits of him were made
in his life and these Roman copies may be pretty
accurate. Of medium build, he also was said to have
a very pleasant scent to his skin and breath, which
for those times was pretty remarkable if you know
what I mean. He was an incredible physical specimen
who loved strenuous exercise -- he would jump off
and back on a chariot moving at full speed. His
lover Hephaestion was taller and even more
handsome, if possible -- the Persian Queen bowed to
him instead of Alexander when she was presented to
them. Alexander said to the mortified queen "Never
mind, Mother, Hephaestion is also
Alexander".

This
detail from a tomb (above) is thought to represent
Hephaestion.

How do
we know Alexander was gay?

2,300 years ago men in Greece had
wives, mistresses, and lovers of either gender. Alexander's
father, Philip of Macedon, had male lovers and also many
wives, a problem when half-brothers would fight to the death
over the throne. Alexander refused to marry and beget an
heir when he left Macedon to conquer the world.

Alexander loved his boyhood friend,
Hephaestion. Both brilliant boys, they were tutored by
Aristotle, with whom Hephaestion kept up a lifelong
correspondence. Alexander and Hephaestion felt like the two
heroes Achilles and Patroclus, from The Iliad, which was
Alexander's favorite book.

Hephaestion started off as a regular
cavalry soldier - Alexander did not play favorites - and
rose through the ranks on merit and carried out the most
important military and administrative assignments. Later,
Alexander also fell in love with a courtier from the
conquered Persian court, scandalous not because the courtier
was male, but because he was Persian -- most Greeks thought
that other people were barbarians. Alexander married a
princess from a faraway mountain kingdom of Asia, but it's
unclear if he loved her because their only child was born
much later. He also married the defeated Persian king's
daughter, a purely political marriage, and Hephaestion
married her sister, since he and Alexander wanted their
children to be cousins.

After they conquered Asia,
Hephaestion died suddenly of typhus. Alexander's grief was
monumental. He asked the oracles if Hephaestion was a god
(back then people could become gods by achievement) and was
told that Hephaestion was indeed a hero, a lesser type of
god. Now Alexander, who had no doubt about his own divinity,
knew that he would meet his beloved again in the Blessed
Realm, where gods and heroes live. He got his first wife
pregnant and died himself without waiting for the child to
be born, all within eight months of Hephaestion's death,
just as Achilles had followed Patroclus in the Iliad. He was
32 years old.

But
don't just take MY word for it....

This is from Robin Lane
Fox: Alexander the Great:

Hephaestion was
the man Alexander loved, and for the rest of
their lives their relationship remained as
intimate as it is now irrecoverable: Alexander
was only defeated once, the Cynic philosophers
said long after his death, and that was by
Hephaestion's thighs. (p. 56)

At the age of thirty
Alexander was still Hephaestion's lover although
most young Greeks would have grown out of the
fashion by then and an older man would have
given up or turned to a younger attraction.
Their affair was a strong one; Hephaestion grew
to lead Alexander's cavalry most ably and to
become Vizier before dying a divine hero, worthy
of posthumous worship. (p. 57)

[Alexander's royal
bodyguard] were the nobles whom Alexander
loved and trusted, whether tough like Leonnatus,
famed for his gymnastics, or shrewd like
Ptolemy, a friend from childhood; Hephaestion
still predominated, faithfully inclining to the
Persian customs of his king and lover. (p.
430)

And from Mary Renault, in
The Nature of Alexander :

With Hephaestion
he remained in love, at a depth where the
physical becomes almost irrelevant; and years
later Bagoas [a Persian courtier] was
still his recognized eromenos [Greek for
"lover"]. (p. 185)

And from The Random House
Encyclopedia, New Revised Edition, 1983:

A more immediate
project was the marriage of Alexander and
Hephaestion, his closest friend and lover, to
two of the daughters of Darius [the recently
conquered Persian emperor], while another 80
Macedonian officers married daughters of Persian
nobles. (p. 1005)

But
wait, here's more....

Paul Cartledge is Professor
of Greek History in the University of Cambridge,
and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. The
following is from an article he wrote just before
publication of his book, Alexander the Great:
The Hunt for a New Past (2004).

Aristotle is said
to have advised Alexander to treat all non
Greeks as slavish 'barbarians', advice which
Alexander--to his credit--conspicuously did not
follow. Indeed, he married, polygamously, three
'barbarians'--the daughter of a Sogdian warlord
and two Persian royal women--and encouraged his
closest companions to take foreign wives too. No
doubt, as with Philip's marriages, these were
predominantly motivated by realpolitik. It is
notable that, unlike his father, Alexander
married no Macedonian nor Greek woman. Moreover
his marriages were designed to further a policy
of orientalisation, the playing down of an
exclusive Hellenism and the promotion of
Graeco-oriental political and cultural
mix.

The question of
Alexander's sexuality--his predominant sexual
orientation--has enlivened, or bedevilled, much
Alexander scholarship. That he loved at least
two men there can be little doubt. The first was
the Macedonian noble Hephaestion, a friend from
boyhood, whom he looked on--and may actually
have referred to--as his alter ego. The Persian
queen mother, it was said, once mistook the
taller Hephaestion for Alexander, who graciously
excused her blushes by murmuring that 'he too is
Alexander'. Whether Alexander's relationship
with the slightly older Hephaestion was ever of
the sort that once dared not speak its name is
not certain, but it is likely enough that it
was. At any rate, Macedonian and Greek mores
would have favoured an actively sexual component
rather than inhibiting or censoring it. Like
hunting, homosexuality was thought to foster
masculine, especially martial,
bravery.

The other non-female
beloved of Alexander's was named Bagoas. He was
not just a 'barbarian' (Persian) but also a
eunuch. There was a long Middle Eastern
tradition of employing eunuchs as court
officials, especially where a harem system was
in place, as at the Achaemenid royal court
(witness the Biblical book of Esther). Bagoas
was not the first Persian court eunuch, either,
to act as a power-broker between rival
individuals and factions. A homonymous
predecessor had done his murderous worst through
the arts of poison, paving the way for Darius
III's immediate predecessor to assume the
Persian throne. The methods of Alexander's
Bagoas were no less effective, if less violent,
and Alexander's personal commitment to him seems
to have attained levels of sexual intimacy that
his Greek and Macedonian courtiers found
embarrassing.

Extra!
News flash! Film at 11!

A report by Dr. David Oldach (bro of
my pal John Oldach!) and colleagues in The New England
Journal of Medicine gives a modern diagnosis of Alexander's
death.
Click here
to check out the scoop as reported in The Baltimore
Sun.

We can't just expect historians from
the past to come right out and say that Alexander was gay --
you'd be considered unprofessional, a crackpot gossip. It
was just not done. So they had to find other ways to express
it. Here's a perfect example, a guy from Victorian England.
Read what he says about Alexander and decide for yourself.
After you wade through all the dense Victorian verbiage, do
you think he thinks Alexander was gay?

David George
Hogarth (1862-1927)
English archaeologist, director of the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford (1909-1927), and diplomat who was associated with the
excavation of several important archaeological
sites.

About Alexander, Hogarth writes,

"...his nature was neither cold
nor passionless. The flame burned fiercely enough in
Alexander, little issue though it found in the love of
women."

About Hephaistion:

"Was there not in Alexander's
life at least one emotional friendship, a friendship of that
type which, based obscurely on passion, in certain natures
passes the love of women?"

About Alexander's response to
Hephaistion's death:

"...at Ecbatana there fell upon
him a stunning blow, the loss of Hephaistion. It
followed close on the second treason and final flight of
another of the few intimates of his boyhood, Harpalus,...And
now Hephaistion too was gone, the congenial enthusiastic
nature which had been so much more to Alexander than
Ptolemy's sagacity or Nearchus' careful courage, the
friend, more than a friend, and closer than a brother, who
alone awoke a gentler emotion in the breast of the lonely
Conqueror. For there come, alike in discouragement and
exaltation, to all men, however strong of body or brain,
moments of craving, in which the soul gropes blindly for
another soul; and the most strong, if he owns this need
most rarely, feels it most imperious. The blood
of Olympias ran hotly in the veins of her son beneath
that crust with which ambition and its fulfillment had
overlaid him. In all things passionate, he
passionately craved sympathy, and all the masterful
yearnings of his soul had been satisfied first and only by
Hephaistion. The rest of the world had dwindled
beneath his feet; and lo! now in a moment he was left in
such a solitude as had seldom been the doom even of
kings. All the savage in Alexander was unchained: he
passed from paroxysm to paroxysm of emotion, at one moment
abased in utter despair, at another seeking to fulfil
his soul in strenuous cruelty. The last resources of
extravagance were exhausted in sending the dear ghost
worthily to the world below, and such a monument arose as
only kings can raise to the one human being with whom they
have been able to lay aside the king."

David George Hogarth, Philip and
Alexander of Macedon: Two Essays in Biography (New
York: Books For Libraries Press, 1971),
162-163, 266-267. (First pub. 1897 by C. Scribner
Sons, New York.)

Alexander
sacked cities,killed rivals, and sold
people into slavery, but aside from that he was a really
great guy. But seriously folks, two thousand years ago
people were, well, pagans. The peaceful Christian
philosophies of our millenium (which has seen the
Inquisition, Hiroshima and Auschwitz) were not known. By
this measure, Alexander was truly enlightened for his time,
shocking his contemporaries by treating foreigners
(especially women) with respect, restoring former rulers,
governments, and religions which the Persians had
suppressed, and even giving them high positions in his
Empire. He was exceptionally generous, sharing all the
treasures of his conquests with his troops. He made some
horrible mistakes, including killing an old family friend in
a drunken brawl, but he was deeply religious, and truly
believed that by exceeding the feats of the gods (like
Hercules) he could become a god himself. He was the first to
seriously envision all people as God's children.

In this mosaic from
Pompeii, which is a copy of a Greek painting, Alexander
(left) fights the Persian Emperor Darius III at the battle
of Issus.

As a general, Alexander is
among the greatest the world has ever known. He
commanded from the front, leading the cavalry side
by side with Hephaestion (since Alexander was a
lefty they must have been hell on wheels together
in battle). Alexander was wounded by every weapon
of war known at the time. He even jumped down alone
into an enemy citadel and fought until he could be
rescued -- taking an arrow in his chest for his
trouble. These traits inspired love and
devotion
in his army who followed him 22,000 miles (on
foot!) for eight years.

Alexander the
warrior, above, with the lion helmet of Hercules,
and below with the horns of the god
Ammon.

What can
we learnfrom the magnificent story
of Alexander the Great? One thing might be that you can be
king, you can conquer the world, you can even be a god, but
when your beloved dies, it all becomes worthless, and you
follow him.

There's a new novel
about Alexander coming out;click
herefor my review
and correspondence with the publicist!

Want more?
Here's a link to
a page on Alexander's sexuality on a comprehensive Alexander
the Great web site:

Alexander
the Great on the Web is the
preeminent website on Alexander the Great in history and
culture. It sorts and describes some 1,000 online resources,
from biographies to movies, academic papers to political
arguments.

Alexander's
story is so great you've got to read about him. March right
on over to your library.

And what
about you???Alexander was 21 when he set out
to become a legend. What are you doing to conquer
your world? Fill out a HERO FORM and tell the world what
you're up to. We'll post your story here at GayHeroes.com on
our LEGENDS LIST for all to see. It's easy, it's fun, it's
self-aggrandizing!Fill out a
HERO
FORM! Don't MYTH
your chance to be on the LEGENDS
LIST!

Click here to
fill out a HERO FORM.

Click here to check out the LEGENDS LIST.

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